An image of the Scarecrow from Batman: Arkham Asylem. Very nice update of the suit. The character designs on this game seem very hit or miss though.

90% of the guys at Comic Con are perfectly normal. 10% have serious personal boundary issue. Every year, there are reports of female attendees being stalked, and booth babes being groped and rubbed against.

Who will this contest most appeal to?

The best part is that they explicitly say you can commit an ‘act of lust’ with any booth babe at Comic Con. Not just those at Dante Inferno, or other EA sites, where the women might be informed of the contest.

You’d think EAs legal department would quickly grasp how this is a bad idea.

I have a list of about twelve LSN subjects in Word doc on my computer, not including various reviews. I figured I’d tackle the most basic one: WHAT IS A GAME?

A game is structured play. (That answer so does not justify the dramatic all caps.)

If a bunch of kids run around and whack at one another, they’re playing. If they create a set of rules –one person whacks at a time, everyone runs/hides from the whacker, if you’re whacked by the whacker then you become the whacker, no whack backs – then they’re playing a game of tag. This structure is usually called the rules, but it might just be a set of guidelines. This structure may be static or dynamic, it might be simple or complex, and it might have a win/loss condition. Win or loss conditions are popular, because they create a definitive ending, and because winning is a powerful motivation.


The human ability to create and communicating an abstract structure is beyond animal intelligence, but there’s definitely proto-gameplay in social animals. For instance, if you wrestle with your dog, they’ll occasionally mouth or snap at you. You can teach them to not do this. ‘Wrestle with me but no biting’ is a form of structured play, as is ‘I toss the ball, and you bring it back.’

Humans like to play and humans like to play games. Games are more important than we tend to give them credit for, but before we talk about that, we need to answer another question: WHAT IS PLAY?

According to Wikipedia, ‘Play is a rite and a quality of mind in engaging with one's worldview. Play refers to a range of voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities that are normally associated with pleasure and enjoyment.’ [1]

If you can parse that first sentence, you are one smart ninja.

I define play an engaging activity that doesn’t matter. Washing your sheets and making your bed matter, jumping on your bed does not. A sudden burp isn’t an engaging activity, burping the alphabet is. Play is innately frivolous, and more demanding than sitting on the couch and watching TV.

Play tends to be associated with children. In many animals, playful behavior happens mostly in childhood and then drops off sharply when it sexual maturity rolls around. Smarter animals tend to play more and play longer than dumber ones. This is because play is a useful learning tool.



A bunch of wolf pubs wrestle, and they learn in a safe environment things like physical coordination, fighting, using their strength, moving quickly, etc. They also start working out pack behavior. Play, like sex, is nature’s way of getting us to do useful activities under the guise of having fun.
Why are games so popular then? Because being a functional, adult human means operating within hundreds of abstract, arbitrary structures. Games teach us how to learn. How to adapt our mindset and behavior to an external rule set, and to internalize those structures and winning conditions.

Monopoly money has no intrinsic value, but neither does ‘real’ money. Value emerges because everyone agrees to operate as though it exists. There’s no reason for soccer/football players to not pick up the ball, and there’s no reason for game reviewers not to take gifts in exchange for good reviews, but these rules still exist, and those who break them aren’t playing fair.

These words that you’re reading, the syntax, associated sounds, semantics, and symbols, all utterly arbitrary, but I have to spend years studying and using the English language if I want to communicate.

A love of gameplay suggests a love of exploring and mastering abstract structures. It can also suggest a desire for simplicity. Games are easier than the real thing. It’s easier to win a game of Guitar Hero than it is to learn to play Stairway to Heaven. It’s easier to get to 450 in Tailoring in WoW than it is to learn how to sew a prom dress in the real world. There are brilliant chessmasters out there, but even a grand master is fighting a battle far more simplistic and easy than any real world general.

Games can be mastered. Real life, not so much.

Humans are messy, and the line between game and reality can get blurred. Professional poker and baseball players make their livelihood off games. A woman has sex with a man after he gives her enough gold in WoW for her to buy an epic, flying mount. A fourteen-year-old in Russia murders his seventeen-year-old Counter Strike rival.

I’d argue (and I might be pulling this from my backside) that like the value of money, and the idea that soccer players who pick up the ball are doing something wrong, frivolousness vs seriousness is a collective illusion. Having sex so someone will by you an epic, flying mount isn’t all that different from having sex with someone so they’ll buy you a new car. Murdering someone because they beat you at Counter-Strike, isn’t that different from murdering someone because they slept with your wife or got the promotion you didn’t.

I’m not about to break out the Nietzsche, but I’m reminded of a review that Yatzee did not long ago for the Sims 3. He complained that in the Sims, the player wasn’t the one in charge, the Sims were. You appeared to be in control – a god of sorts- but in reality, you catered to their every whim. I have to ask, how is that different from every other video game out there?

You’re mastering the system to win, but in order to do so, you become utterly subservient to the developer’s structure and desires. It doesn’t matter how good you are at hoop jumping, you’re still jumping through other people’s hoops. Your ‘winning’ is nothing but an electronic doggy-treat that you pay the developer to give you.

In that light, the massive popularity of games takes on disturbing connotations.

…
…

SHEEP! YOU’RE ALL SHEEP. THE LOT OF YOU!!

See also: Why animals love to play.

This has nothing to do with video games. Though the bottom talks about a computer utility.

Imagine you are a sweet, young, and innocent lesbian stripper ninja. You head to the dentist one day due to a toothache and he tells you that decay has hit the root of your back molar and the best thing to do is extract it. You could also do a root canal + post + crown, but that’s more expensive, would take longer, what’s left of the tooth is like ‘an eggshell’, and there’s a wisdom tooth right behind it that’s starting to press on the roots.

You agree to the extraction, which should take twenty minutes. It took THREE HOURS.

They used dozens of tools on me. They drilled the tooth into parts to separate the roots. Some electrical thing burned away parts of my gum. Dozens of tools went into my mouth and came out covered in saliva and blood. After the first half-hour, the dentist’s hands shook from the effort of just grasping the end of the molar while prying and pulling as hard as he could without anything budging. They gave me so much anesthetic, I lost sensation in my nose, but I was still treated to occasional bursts of pain as they cracked my tooth and tore it out millimeter by millimeter.

Dentist: This is one of the most difficult extractions I’ve done in twenty years.
LSN: hh.
Dentist: But you’re very calm, you’re a good patient.
LSN: *shrug* (there’s not much else you can do after someone’s cracked your tooth into bits and drilled away the pulp)

Apparently, I have strong gums, significant root curvature, and there are bulbs at the end of my roots. At two hours, forty minutes, the dentist yanked out the last root… and then explained that there was a root tips left within. After twenty minutes of digging and scraping within my gum with a series of picks, he took another X-ray and realized that wasn’t a root tip, but my wisdom tooth.

Ha ha?

Since then, I’ve had a slice of bread, two darvocet, a glass of water, and four hours of sleep. I want chocolate or tapioca pudding.



On to defragmentation! It’s important. The people at Priform are wonderful because they give us ccleaner, which I install on every computer I can get alone for 6 minutes. It’s a utility I run on a daily basis. It takes little time to work. It’s easy. It’s free. It doesn’t try to get me to upgrade to the ‘full’ version, it installs only itself, and it never tries to advertize crap I don’t want.

As such, when I updated my copy today and noticed Defraggler – a defragmentation utility by the same company – I downloaded it immediately. I play games. I constantly install and uninstall stuff. I ought to defragment more often, but my internal HD is 586 GB while my external HD is 300 GB. Defragmenting takes too long, and the software that comes with Windows is finky; if I’m messing around with my computer, it slows it down, but if I leave my computer alone, it complains and stops working. It’s like asking a teenager to do the dishes.

Defraggler helps some of the problems but seems to have its own oddities. I downloaded, installed, and ran it on two computers at work – no problem. It seems less resource intensive than Norton or Microsoft’s Defragment program. I used it on a laptop and computer running XP, the laptop is older than 2004 while the computer has those sticks of RAM that are as long as your arm. 2002, maybe? Either way, I was able to work on them while the program ran with no slow down, and for both (26% and 31% fragmentation) it took about 2-3 hours to complete.

The real test came when I got home. My computer had 41% fragmentation. I turned on the program and headed out to my dentist appointment. When I came back this evening… the program had freaked out. I’m not sure what happened. When I clicked it, it filled the screen with a large, blank box, and when I clicked it again, it minimized.

I restarted the computer, restarted Defraggler and... I had 45% fragmentation? I left it to frolic again, went to bed, and after four hours of sleep, I came back to find that it wasn’t running.

The thing is, I’m in pain and grumpy and hungry but can’t eat because of the pain and the bloody wound where my molar used to be. It’s very possible I just forgot to turn it on. I run it again and…

It’s strange, when I first ran it, it said that I had more used space than free space, and now it says I have exactly half and half. Did I delete something? Did it delete stuff in some sort of Hall 9000 mental breakdown? Is it defragmenting AND compressing?

It’s been running fine since I first sat down at the computer four hours ago. Internet Explorer is taking more resources than it is. Now, it’s about half way done. But it just disappeared again. It’s not minimizing to the system tray. It just vanishes.

Other than that, it’s a great program.

Divine Divinity 2 came out in Germany today, and I'm ruthlessly swiping these picures from Morgoth at the Obsidian board. I want this game.







I changed my comment settings, so if you attempt to comment, it will take you to a full page. I hope this will help people having difficulties.

This is part two of a two-part review of Mirror’s Edge and contains many spoilers. Read Part 1 for general thoughts.

And here is where I get nitpicky, mostly about the story of Mirror’s Edge.

Mirror’s Edge’s gameplay is good. It’s smooth, responsive, and the blend of puzzle and combat sections (they’re more racing sections as the eight times out of ten you’ll want to avoid combat) work. The bright environments would have been a great set up for grungy, darker environments later on, but that instead we’re treated to grungy, darker cartoons that aren’t all that interesting.

I can buy into the premise of a totalitarian regime taking control of a near future, first-world nation and using the tools we currently associate with informational freedom (the internet, e-mails, video systems) and using them to monitor and control the populous while replacing news systems with propaganda. Runners are one way that people have learned to get around that scrutiny.

The story itself engages in little political or social thought. Strange for a game that’s premise is so political. Faith seems indifferent to the world around her in anything but the most basic level: She runs because Merc taught her to. She investigates the assassination of a politician because her sister is framed.



This is fine; Faith is not required to be an intellectual character. Though I’d be interested in learning her thoughts regarding government power, citizen responsibility, and the tension between keeping a society safe and keeping it free, this is Faith’s game, and these topics never appear to enter her stream of conscious.

Okay then, perhaps Faith is more of an intuitive or emotive person. The cartoons suggest she’s a ‘survivor’ who’s learned to evade the law and make it on the streets at a very young age. This is a great beginning for a story, but it’s not enough. A good story has the main character changing in some way.

This is why Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is one of the best stories in gaming. In the beginning, the Prince is arrogant, ambitious, and obsessed with earning honor and glory. His actions lead to death/corruption of those around him, including his beloved father (and possibly the corruption of the world, but that’s not the central issue for him.) Throughout the game, he learns humility, he learns to take responsibility for his actions, and he learns to trust others and put them first.

Fiction 101: the protagonist goes through a series of challenges in pursuit of a goal that changes them for better (Prince of Persia) or worse (Scarface.)

Video games have gotten away with ‘Aliens/demons/Nazis attack, you fight them and win!’ for a long time, but Mirror’s Edge is trying hard to be something unique. The bits between chapters are obviously attempts to make Faith and the story’s events more meaningful than ‘Police attack, you run/fight them and win, ‘ but that attempt is a failure.
When Kate, Faith’s sister, is revealed I was thrilled. She’s one of the ‘Blues,’ the police that are the runner’s main advisory. I suspect Kate is a lawful good paladin; when faced with a government that robs people of their freedoms and a corrupt police force, she joins the police and tries to be one of the good guys. I think the story as-is would be better told with her as the main character: she’s a good cop framed for the murder of a rising politician. While running from the law, she uncovers a plot to take over the city, and ends up working with ‘criminals’ she once fought in order to make sure the current Mayor doesn’t replace the police with a private army he owns.

When Faith first leaves Kate, she urges her sister to come with her. To run from the police about to enter the building, arrest Kate for assassination, and find her guilty in a mock trial. Kate’s response? She’s staying there. Faith will run, Faith always runs, but Kate will stand.




And, when you have a story about oppression, then you need a character who will stand for something. Faith never becomes this person. She runs, and saves her sister, but she seems as unconcerned with the bigger problems of the world and the events that led her sister to being wrongfully imprisoned, as she is when the game starts.

“I love my sister and would do anything to save her’ is touching, and a great starting point for the story, but it’s not enough.

That Video Game Blog was cast out, never to darken my blogroll again. I’ve replaced it with gamepolitics.com and rockpapershotgun.com. Thank you deepseasharc!

As you might have noticed, the Mirror’s Edge part 2 never materialized. What you might not have noticed is that my Night Elf warrior made it from level 6 to level 20 since I wrote part one. (The blood-elf rogue is twittling her thumbs at level 23) Tomorrow though, you can expect part 2 and some thoughts on Diablo.

I’d like to know more about the people visiting my blog: deepseasharc and Pai, tell me a bit about yourself. What kinds of games do you play? How long have you been a gamer? If you could change/improve one thing about gaming right now, what would it be?

A few days ago, That Video Game Blog posted an announcement that EA would be hosting a panel on homophobia and virtual communities by GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). I posted, praising EA for stepping up to the plate as one of the largest publishers in the industry.

My comment never got posted, but several deriding the panel or the idea that homophobia was an issue in gaming communities managed to get posted.

This is part one of a two-part review of Mirror’s Edge and contains no spoilers while part two refers to specific events and situations within the game.

Last night I finished Mirror’s Edge, and I have to say it was an exquisite experience. From the visceral gameplay to the bright, bold aesthetic, from the electronic soundscape to the heroine herself, Mirror’s Edge take us out of the realm of business as usual when it comes to video games.

This isn’t to say that the game lacks flaws. My emotional landscape was like this as I played: Pleasure of discovery –> Comfort as I settle into the game –> Frustration as I am pulled frequently out of it –> Disappointment as the game’s weaknesses mount –> Focus as the intensity and difficulty rises –> And finally, satisfaction as I reach the end. In many ways, the game is like the player/character when you first play; it stumbles into the bright sunlight and can’t quite control itself. The game is polished, but underneath the smooth animations is a constant unease. It’s a game that doesn’t trust its core mechanic of constant momentum, which is a shame as the momentum - the ducking, running, sliding, and leaping as you navigate the environment - is wonderful.

Since Mirror’s Edge came out in December, I’ve read several reviews, professional and non-professional, and I wonder to what extent they suffered from hype poisoning. I recall that when the in-game trailer dropped, people were all over it. When a game fails to live up to one’s expectations, the emotional backlash can be brutal. Mirror’s Edge is not a perfect game or a revolutionary game. It’s a good game with problems. It also delivers a unique experience, and that is something I crave in my entertainment.



Mirror’s Edge does a good job at embodiment. I am both aware of Faith as a separate entity, even as I lose myself in her motions. She becomes an extension of myself, but never disappears entirely. Her feet are right there, as well as her legs if I fall on my ass. I can hear her breathing constantly, the various grunts of effort as she moves. If the ‘sight’ is placed on a close object, the ones far away blur slightly as she focuses. There’s the jerk of her pulling back from a ledge I’m not quite aware of or the slight exhalation of breath she makes right before she drops into a slide.

I’ve played first-person shooters before, and I’ve played third-person acrobatic based games, and I find the blend works. There are times that Faith speaks directly to the player, and I’m okay with that. She’s not me, but we don’t need transplant character e.g., Farrah in the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. We’re close enough that her stray thoughts make their way to me.

The story works best when it keeps me along for the ride. Between each chapter, there’s an animated interlude, in which everything is inevitably drab and grey. It’s like no one bothered to tell the animation director that the color scheme tended towards white broken up by swathes of strong color. Not only does it take the player out of the action into the role of a watcher, but the muted colors suggest that it’s not as important or interesting as the rest of the game.

During the actual gameplay sections, Faith is oddly silent. Instead, we have Merc (short for Mercury) constantly barking orders at her. This is especially annoying during difficult sections where he’ll make the same useless comment –“Be careful, Faith. Watch out.” – over and over and over. This is especially annoying when I’m being shot at. When bullets are flying, neither Faith nor I need a guy sitting at a computer miles away to tell us to be careful. As I said, Faith’s thoughts make their way to me, but doesn’t seem to do much thinking.



Earlier concepts made her a gang member and gave her a bit of ‘tude. The developers dropped that, but didn’t pick up the slack. What is Faith’s personality? I believe they intentionally made her blank so the player could project, but this was a misstep.

I wonder to what extent the fact that Faith is female played in this. I know some guys decided this was a girl’s game simply because the main character was a woman. I’m not fond of the faceless blob hero: Dead Space, Doom, and Portal come to mind. I’d rather play someone like Dante, Duke Nukem, Sam Fisher, or the Prince. My ability to empathize with and care about what a character cares about is never helped by a lack of personality.



Part 2 tonight.

This blog got its first comment today. Hurray! ... apparently the author has deleted it.

We can all speculate on what the comment could have been. It's better this way; now the comment possesses infinite possibilities.

A cross post from the Bioboard.

BitMob has billed itself as the place 'Where Community Meets the Press.' Lately it has released a couple of articles that are the journalistic equivalent of pond scum. (All provided by community members, of course.)

The latest is, The Face of Gaming Needs a Make-Over. I clicked on it thinking it might relate to the depiction of minorities in gaming. Ha!

The article begins simply enough: “Being a 27-year-old male I am still surprised how consistently I have to defend the honor of videogames. I dream of the day when games aren't looked at as the lowest rung on the entertainment ladder.”

Okay! This is written by an adult who wants one of his preferred entertainment venues to receive the respect he feels it disserves. Now, he’s being a touch melodramatic (“I have to defend the honor” makes it sound as those TV lovers are constantly calling him out in duels) but I also would like video games to get a bit more respect as an artistic medium. Um, well, he says entertainment but I’m sure he means artistic or intellectual respect.

“The gaming industry grosses just as much money as movies or books, yet both of those are seen as intellectually superior. Why is that?”

Huh? Yes, video games are more profitable than films and books, but that hardly seems like a pertinent fact. The amount of money a product makes has nothing to do with its intellectual value. Dumb and Dumber made more money than Pan’s Labyrinth. Harry Potter made more money than The Things They Carried. Halo made more money than Psychonauts. Yet I’ve heard the latter all described as strongly intellectual or artistic works, while the former aren’t.

I’d suggest the answer to the question ‘Why is that?’ would be that video games still largely lack the elements needed to be considered intellectually superior.

“Just as clearly, I remember the first time I knocked out Mike Tyson, and the first time I dominated in a 16-person Halo LAN party. These are all great feelings, but truthfully none of them really accomplished anything. I didn't solve world hunger; I didn't save anyone's life. Just because they weren't actual accomplishments doesn't take from the enjoyment I experienced while partaking in these events. These were legitimate pleasurable moments in my life, and looking back neither making the winning basket or beating Punch-Out!! is better or worse. They are just different.”

And interestingly, the author is back to games as mere entertainment. Games are about ‘great feelings’ and do not make one’s life ‘better or worse.’ I’ve never heard a fan of film or books say the same about their preferred medium. Personally, 1984 did not give me a great feeling, but it did expose me to ideas about language and societal power that have become part and parcel of how I conceptualize the world.

” I've learned that pointing out the inconsistencies in people's beliefs does no good. For instance, whether you are reading a book or watching TV, you're doing the same amount of activity. Yet, I've been told countless times by people attempting to impress me, "I don't watch TV, I'd rather read a good book."”

Watching TV and reading a book require the same amount of physical activity, therefore they are intellectually equal -- At this point, I’ve decided the writer has no idea what he’s talking about. He also fails to point out how preferring a book over TV is inconsistent.

Moving ahead to this man’s plan to save ‘the face of gaming.’

” The only way to make people accept something new is to make them feel that they are stupid for not understanding it.

The next time someone wants you to explain to them why gaming is a legitimate source of entertainment, brush them off. Tell them that they won't understand. Make them feel stupid and inadequate. Say things like, "How can I put BioShock in layman's terms?" and then sigh and stare bravely at the horizon. Or, "Let's see if I can dumb down for you why Final Fantasy is awesome." Maybe leave out the part about how Tifa was the first woman you really loved.“

Wow. Just wow.

Don’t make better games. Don’t promote and support games which expand and improve the medium. Don’t attempt to foster an attitude within the gaming community that values more than mindless run-and-gun with cutting edge graphics. Don’t demand more of yourself as a gamer – perhaps exploring outside your preferred genre or thinking critically about the games you buy.

This man’s plan for saving the face of gaming is to spew BS. Pretty thin BS too, if he thinks Bioshock has elements that would be difficult to put into layman's terms.

I think Derek Amundson should take his collection of games, pile them up, urinate on them, and set them on fire, because that would be the best expression of the esteem he holds video games in. He doesn’t want games to *be* intellectually superior. He wants his grandmother (seriously, read the article) to consider his Halo matches just as good as Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Personally, I’d rather a developer make the gaming equivalent of Remembrance, or Pan’s Labyrinth, or the Things They Carried, and to for enough people to buy it that they can stay in business. The face of gaming I’d like to change is the (white, male) grizzled space marine who solves his problems by killing stuff or Madden MCXXXVI.

The great thing is that I see this happening. The sad thing is the so-called ‘fans of gaming’ whose only objection to the current state of gaming is that Fox News writes mean stories about us.

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. I had a birthday, bought a new pair of ninja booties, went dirt bike riding, and puked in the woods. Heat stroke is not fun! And yes, I did drink plenty of water.

Since then I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge. Remember that game? It was hot stuff in fall/winter 2008. Everyone was talking about the trailer. Then it hit and disappeared.

For some reason, I thought UbiSoft developed it. Possibly because like Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed, it’s based on performing amazing acrobatics in order to navigate an area. Possibly because the last time I recall an Asian woman as the lead character of Western video game, it was Beyond Good and Evil.

Interestingly, the game’s writer, Rhianna Pratchett, worked on the last Prince of Persia game, as well as the Overlord II game I talked about a month ago.

Narrative.

It’s a popular term among those who talk about games in an abstract or intellectual level, but it’s often a misnomer, as in A Word Worth a Thousand Pictures and Narrative Manifesto.

Narrative is not a synonym for ‘story.’ (Nor is story the same as plot.) A narrative can tell a story, but it requires a narrator. For instance, the sentence, “The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is part of our cultural narrative,” does not mean that Hurricane Katrina is a tragedy. It means that our culture has taken an event and described it as a tragedy. It focuses on the role of culture as storyteller, and the fact that, as a people, we take reality and fictionalize it, often adding a moral or symbolic dimension.

I’m being pedantic about this because I believe having a specific word that emphasizes the narrator and story as artifact[1] is a useful. There are times when you want to focus on the story and times when you want to focus on the telling of the story.

“Schindler’s List is/has a powerful narrative.” – True and accurate, but unless it’s part of a wider context, reads as “Schindler’s List is a powerful movie.”

“In the black-and-white film, the image of a girl in a red coat wandering alone the turmoil of Cracow ghetto is a powerful narrative tool. Like Schindler, the audience cannot absorb the horror of six million people dying, but is deeply affected by the plight of one child.” – I prefer this use.

[1] – Not artifact as in historical relic, but artifact as in the product of individuals, groups, or cultures.

I’m taking the Ages in the order their principles appeared in Atris’ journal, so Edanna, the nature age, is next. It’s the one that interests me most conceptually, but aggravates me most in execution. The idea here is to show the player the interdependence within nature both within the environment and through the interaction of the player with the bird (the player first saves the bird and at the end of the Age the bird flies the player to end of the puzzle.) Color is an important indicator within Exile. As in nature, something brightly or vibrantly colored indicates you should pay attention to it.

My first problem is personal, though I wonder to what extent the developers intended this: I have trouble navigating the Age. Many times, I ‘step’ forward down path and am confronted with a wall of green or brown instead of a visible route. I then swing my view around and begin to generally click in the direction I believe the path continues, sometimes this works and sometimes I have to take a ‘step’ back to reorient myself and then try again. This is immensely frustrating, and after awhile I became slightly nauseated.

It’s fine for the game to have difficult-to-find spots and routes, but this felt as though what would be a relatively simple task in the real world became hard because of poor visual design. Then again, maybe the sense of disorientation was deliberate, but if so, how does that encourage the ‘nature rewards interdependence’ theme? If this were a horror game, I could understand – being chased by something nasty while you struggle to make your way through a thick, damp jungle and swamp sounds interesting.

(I assume here that my experience is average. It’s quite possible that I just have poor spatial analysis when it comes to busy 2d environments.)



For a nature age that stresses interdependence, Edanna has a very mechanical feel and there’s little evidence of interdependence. A glowing manta ray moves along a series of sacs on a vine pipeline but… why? How does this benefit the animal? How does it benefit the plant? The player appears to be the only creature who would press the ends of the sac and cause the manta ray to move from one place to another. It would die in the first sac without the player. In the end it, the animal ends up in a small pool of water with no steady food source or mate – I can’t see this as something nature would allow to go on for very long.

The environment exists only so the player can interact with it. The story exists to provide a reason for the player to interact with the environment and to explain how these elaborate environments were created. The problem is that plants and animals, unlike machines, have their own reason for existing as they do. A machine can exist only to provide a charge that causes another machine to react. A glowing manta ray cannot exist only to provide a charge that causes a giant venus fly trap to open.

Anyways, it took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete this Age. I began tinkering with the dynamic forces age and so far it's interesting.

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (CAGAAV to his friends), invented the voltaic pile, what we call the battery. He lent his last name to his invention, as well as the volt, Voltron: Defender of the Universe, and the Voltaic Age in Myst III Exile. We can only wonder which of these he’d be most proud of, though I have to say that Defender of the UNIVERSE is damned impressive.

The Voltaic Age took me two and a half hours of play, not counting the time I alt+tabbed my way to a crash and had to redo fifteen minutes. The majority of this time I spent fiddling with red steam valves and wondering why I felt oddly attracted to the windows.

It’s the energy age, so the dominant imagery is mechanical stuff. How the original Star Trek portrayed future tech is how this portrays a hydroelectric, steam, and lava powered magnetic land floater.



I’m enjoying Exile so far. I’d forgotten that you could look around via the mouse and it’s vast improvement over the still images of Riven. There’s apparently an elaborate back-story involving the D’ni and the collapse of their civilization that I’ve missed – oh well. I vaguely remember reading a book about a woman from our world falling into a pit in the Sahara desert; apparently, the D’ni currently live under the surface of the earth. You’d think if you had magical books that could link you to hundreds of worlds, you might relocate your civilization to an Age that looked like Maui. Then again, this race neglects the use of locks, safes, and guard dogs for guarding their treasures, but instead constructs elaborate environmental puzzles. They’re a sort of dwarven Bond villain.

I talked about lower order vs higher order problem solving previously, and Exile has stayed firmly in the lower order end. One of the first puzzles you encounter is getting an elevator to work: there’s a notebook in the same room with pictures on how to arrange the mechanisms. The next puzzle is moving a giant ball via two levers. Then there’s one where light travels through a series of lenses. Each of these puzzles is a discrete entity – you either know immediately what needs to be done or it makes itself apparent after a bit of fiddling.

In Voltaic itself, I stumbled upon a puzzle that I solved without any thought: I went to one interface, moved a few pieces, then went to another other and while I was moving pieces, wondering if the numbers above the circuitry meant anything, the interface slammed closed and the device powered up. As there were five parts all together and I’d only touched two, I was a bit confused.

That said, the lower order puzzles are better handled than Riven’s. You tackle a series of manageable problems in Exile, as opposed to wandering around trying to get a handle on a few big puzzles while being tripped up by minutia. Neither approach is better, and in a way they reflect the natures of the men who built the puzzles: Gehn is a meticulous but brilliant bastard while Saavedro is an insane Brad Dourif in a bad wig.

Next I tackle the nature Age with the bird symbol.

I was asked about my posting schedule. I don’t really have one. I began this blog because I wanted to write about computer games and while my posting rate has been daily, my interest in the subject wanes and waxes.

My copy of Infinite Jest arrived today and I plan to retool another blog I have into fantasy and science fiction book reviews. Publishers start sending you free books if you do this enough – awesome!

I witnessed a lengthy conversation in World of Warcraft guild chat about how women were all shallow (?), that men are expected to dress like women now-a-days (?!), and lesbians all wished they had a penis (my secret is exposed!) It’s amazing how much the desire to punch your guild members in the face removes the pleasure from an MMORPG. I rolled another toon, and then just decided to install Exile. Hopefully, I won’t have any problems running it in Vista.

The feminine aesthetic series! You may wonder what happened to the third part. As do I…

I began to work on a post about how this feminine aesthetic was based on rejecting realistic principles of design and viewpoint in favor of more emotionally evocative, fluid ones. Games like Prince of Persia and Okami do this visually, while a game like Silent Hill 2 take it further in that the inhabited world was implicitly a twilight reality that each person within experienced differently. I wasn’t sure if Pychonauts filled the bill as feminine, I wasn’t comfortable with the solidness of my reasoning, and I found myself wondering what the implications of calling this style feminine might be.

It was a mess and I’ve set it aside, letting it stew a bit on the mental back burner before I take another whack on at the idea.

What’s bubbling on the front burner?: Not fun (on purpose) games, games seeking cultural legitimacy, and violence in games. Plus whatever comes up as I play whatever I’m playing. At some point, I’ll have to define what I mean when I say ‘game,’ because my previous definition was brief and incomplete.

When game players, academics, journalists, developers, and miscellaneous hanger-ons talk about games, we tend to use absolutes. This ranges from subjects sublime – “Call of Duty 4 PWNS Crysis!” – to the more mundane – “…my last Kotaku feature… asserted that classic buttons-and-sticks work well because it's more interesting to abstract interaction in game worlds rather than act it out literally.”[1]

This is not a conversational feature exclusive to gamers. People like to talk in absolutes, especially when it comes to intangibles. Alexander’s assertion is similar to writing teachers who say that third-person viewpoint is easier for readers to get into because they can step into the character without the clutter of first-person thoughts reminding them this character is their own person. Or Scott McCloud’s comment that simple, abstract representations of faces are easier to plug into than complex, photorealistic representations. [2]

The actual Kotaku article, In Defense of the Classic Controller follows the conceits of modern journalism and in that it provides a ‘balanced overview’ of the ‘issue.’ (It’s also difficult to find. @Kotaku - front page is #navigationfail)

I believe the real issue is that the Wii won the console war. If the traditional controller were inherently more interesting than the Wii-mote, it’s strange that a console whose main draw was the price point and games that utilized a different control method would trounce the PS3 and Xbox 360, established systems with a wide library of games and impressive graphics. One idea tossed up is that mere novelty is behind the success, but while the Wii-mote may seem awfully different to those of us who have been weaned on the two thumbsticks, four buttons, and bumpers mode of controlling a game and the WASDers, it’s hardly a new idea.

I wasted many quarters in the Chuck E Cheese arcade playing whack-a-mole with a physical mallet; Cruise USA with a physical wheel, and gas and break petals; and Duck Hunt with a physical gun. [3] I never found myself longing for the abstraction of a stick-and-buttons controller with these games, and I don’t believe that people who play Guitar Hero, Dance-Dance Revolution, et alii, would consider the games more interesting if control was more abstract.



The first video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey, had a light gun for its Shooting Gallery game. [4] The Wii isn’t a novel concept; it’s technology finally supporting an old (in game terms) concept. Project Natal builds off that. (We’ll see if Microsoft is able to continue its track record of taking other’s successful ideas and striking gold with them.)

The article states: “The more pressing issue is whether or not controller-less gaming will truly make the medium richer. Making something "more accessible" doesn't necessarily make it better.”

Okay, we can have a medium in which there is only the stick-and-buttons controller, or one in which there is the stick-and-buttons controller, the wii-mote, motion capture, and the various guns, guitars, and dance pads. Unless her suggestion is that if we embrace new technologies, we must chuck the old ones out, it seems evident to me that games become a richer medium when we have a diversity of interactive devices.

Alexander is essentially espousing a Luddite philosophy, and like most Luddites, it’s not the change in equipment, but the change in culture it brings. The stick-and-buttons controller doesn’t need defense because it’s going to disappear, but because others find different, newer controllers better. A lot of others! The anxiety she alludes to is similar to that of a dedicated Everquest player watching the membership of World of Warcraft skyrocket. Instead of being the mainstream of a niche culture, in ten or twenty years, today’s PS3 and Xbox players may become the niche of a mainstream culture.



[1] – Sexy Videogameland: Imagination and abstraction, Leigh Alexander
[2] – Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
[3] – You can’t shoot the dog, but I always tried.
[4] – Wikipedia is never wrong!

My Blood-Elf rogue is an inch from level 20. Yesterday, she traveled from the blood elf city to the undead city to the orc city (Ogrammar) to Crossroads to Ratchet just so I could sit on a pirate ship and grind my lockpicking from 1 to 95. As I sat there, clicking on chest after chest for forty minutes I thought ‘This is why I hate World of Warcraft.’

True, single player RPGs can be grindtastic. I’ve heard Japanese RPGs can be especially demanding, though I’m somewhat ignorant of them.

I also don’t care for profession grinding. I was once able to level a blacksmith/miner who managed to always have gear appropriate for her level, but I’d say that meant that at least a quarter of my play time was devoted to the career. There’s a reason many guides suggest you just pick a gatherer profession and then switch to blacksmithing, leatherworking, or tailoring when you hit high levels. Worse, while I managed to get gear appropriate for my level, it was never as good as what could be found in raids.

My biggest gripe with WoW and other MMORPGs is that I never feel as though I’m winning. I can obsessively play Diablo because I do get that winning sensation. Diablo is blatant in its carrot-and-stick approach, but it works because I crave that feeling of achievement. In WoW, the feeling is that you’ll achieve something… soon. That soon is always on the edge of your horizon, but you never reach it.

Which is why I have my World of Warcraft cycle. I play for hours a day until my toon reaches high level and then I sort of falter off. The game stops appealing to me so I put it aside for a week, which becomes a month, which becomes five months. Then I log on and notice my guild has kicked me out, so I reroll another toon and start again.

This will be the first time I've played a Horde and or with Wrath of the Lich King installed.

On the stack:
Myst: Exile – Never finished it and recently found it gathering dust in my CD holder
Abe’s Odysee – Picked this up but never played it
Giants Citizen Kabuto – The same
Trine - Waiting for more reviews before I buy it. Can anyone comment?
Mirror’s Edge – I have a friend who played this and said she’d give it to me a month ago.

Last night, I zipped through Riven at phenomenal speeds until the game crashed and I realized I hadn’t saved since the first island. I restarted, it forced me to start a new game, and then wouldn’t let me open the saved game. I believe I’ve had this problem since I bought it as I knew the solution was to go to the saved game file in the Riven folder and double click it. I then played until the puzzle island where you first encounter the grid. In the past I mapped out the location of the golden balls with graph paper – I have no idea why as a simple X,Y coordinate system notation does the trick.


The image to the right is my notes so far.

I’m not enjoying the game: it’s too easy. It’s not so much puzzle solving for me as data-gathering. What I’ve realized is that the reason I’m not enjoying the game is the same reason that it’s such a good game: it’s a series of higher order, or conceptual, puzzles.

Take an actual, jigsaw puzzle. On the box cover is an image and in the box is a set of pieces you connect together to make the image. The process is all lower order; the difficulty is fitting things together bit by bit in order to construct something you already know about. When I say Riven is higher-order I mean that it gives you the pieces and asks ‘What’s the larger image?’ The difficulty is in exploring the world and coming to understand the larger image. Once you get it, the pieces take no time to put together. [1]

I already understand the big picture – the rolling eyeballs represent an animal both visually and aurally, the number on the other side represents what order the animals come in – so I’m not puzzle solving, just picking up the list of animals and numbers.

I will probably uninstall and try Exile instead, which I don't recall finishing.


[1] – There are lower order puzzles in Riven as well in the form of finding the various hidden objects you have to operate, e.g., to lower the telescope, you have to notice the little stop that’s blocking it and move it out of the way. The lower order puzzles are binary though: Do you notice the stop or not? Did you close the doors behind you or not? Did you notice that you go under the locked gate or not?

I never played Myst, but got Riven when it first came out and played it once. Three years ago, I played it again and found I remembered the answer to every puzzle. I installed it on my computer today and… I remember everything.

This is incredibly frustrating.

I love Blizzard; they’re one of the publishers I always trust to build a good game. I’ve spent weeks played Diablo and WoW. I’ve played five seconds of Warcraft III and StarCraft. Real Time Strategy is not my cup of tea. Turn-based Stategy, especially for empire building games like Civilization, Alpha Centurai, and Galactic Civilization, are great fun.

Tonight I installed Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War on my PC. Tastes can change over time, right?

I have a head cold and the antihistamines I took keep have me nodding off. I have three different topics I’d like to talk about and hardly enough energy for one. I’ll go with a topical one: Spore.

The Galactic Adventures pack is coming out sometimes soon. I wouldn’t know because EA’s marketing isn’t accurate. For the last two months, I’ve seen banners and ads saying it was ‘available now’ and each time I clicked through I ended up at a pre-order page. (Wiki says it came out June 23 – see, this is kinda, sorta topical!)

This is about original Spore though, and my opinion of it can be summed up thusly: Creativity is no panacea for mediocrity. Just because a game is innovative, genre defying, creative, inspired, artistic – whatever synonym you prefer – does not mean it’s a good game. Even if those same elements can turn a good game into an excellent game.

Which leads to the question, ‘Does a game have to be good to be worthy or important?’ No, not at all. Enter the Dragon is a bad film, but it’s the film that introduced American audiences to Bruce Lee and quality martial artist choreography. Before Enter the Dragon, most Hollywood fight scenes were Western style shootouts or akin to Captain Kirk vs. Gorn.

A c-game[1] is a form of media as well as an art form as well as (sometimes) an interactive narrative form as well as (sometimes) a social experience as well as system the user navigates using heuristic devices. The last is what makes a game a game, and when I say a game is good or bad, that’s major element I’m evaluating.

In a number of reviews, I’ve read that Spore is not one but five games. I’d argue that it’s two games: the pre-space age and the space age. The cell, creature, tribal, and civilization stages [2] are a single game and a bad one at that. The goal in each stage is to grow, you can choose to do so violently or not, and the way you implement your goal is by gathering a resource and buying objects. In the cell and creature stage, these are body parts. In the tribal stage, these are clothing, children, and buildings. In the civilization stage, these are vehicles and buildings.

There are many excellent games built around this core concept: gather resources in order to buy a beneficial improvement. In Civilization IV, a strategy game, I try to gather metals, food, and money so I can by buildings. In Diablo, an action RPG, I kill things to gather XP so I can buy powers and abilities.




The early stages of Spore never go beyond the core concept. It’s about as bare bones as you get and the lack of complexity, of even simple give or take, means you can go through these early stages on cruise control.

I’m not the first view the simplicity of the early sections as problematic, but I’ve notices that many believe this decision was made to appeal to casual gamers. The hardcore/casual schism is ridiculous and mostly perpetuated by ‘real’ or ‘hardcore’ gamers who view the mere existence of games that don’t cater to their tastes as a type of sacrilege. Maxis might have ‘dumbed down’ Spore for casual gamers, but I doubt it.

I play casual games, my mother plays casual games, my mother’s friend plays casual games, and my mother’s friends daughter and *her* daughter both play casual games, often together. Nothing they play is as boring as the first four levels of Spore. Games like Bejeweled or Plants vs Zombies are simple, but still very engaging.

Moving on to the Space Age and we find a semi-decent space civ sim, but still not as good as half-a-dozen other games on the market.

The bottom line is that if it weren’t for the creature/building/vehicle creator, this game would have hit the bargain bin a month after it was released.



Problematically, the creation tool isn’t a game, it’s a tool. It’s fun to play around with. It’s also fun to eat dinner, go to a movie, or doodle on my PC tablet, but while it’s nice when fun and games meet, one does not imply the other. There are parts of the creation tool that relate to the game as you design your creature’s body and pick various parts to buy, but in itself, this isn’t a game.

This makes things difficult for me. If I’m judging a game, do I go by the total experience, or just the game? It’s not that unusual a quandary. If I go out to a restaurant, and get a great view of the ocean, watch the chef prepare the entrée while flames leap up around her, and have great conversation with my friend, but the food itself is lousy, how good was the meal? There are people who love the creation tool. (And not just because they can make a giant dickasaurus) I don’t enjoy it, but I can see how it’s unique and interesting and an impressive feat.

A game does not have to be good to be worthy or important. I’m not sure if this is either of those either. No other developers seem interested in exploring a multi-generational game right now and user-end content creation tools haven’t changed. More accurately, Spore is riding a larger trend in letting users create content.

Ultimately, Spore might be an evolutionary dead-end when it comes to gaming.

1 - Computer or console game
2 - It’s inaccurate to suggest that a tribe isn’t a form of civilization. A bit of unintended ethnocentrism there.

It's a freeware jumping game in which a sadistic queen has her love-slave jump through a huge tower.

Downloadable here.

I assume there's a joke about gamers being masochists in there.

As I plunge headfirst into the rushing waters of the c-game meta community, I’ve grabbed almost every site and blog I could think of and made an effort to watch, read, and sometimes comment. Yesterday, I left two comments on the That Video Game Blog: one on how exclusive like a new Final Fantasy game is what’s propelling the Nintendo’s DS ahead of the Sony PSP and another in praise of an increase in girl gamers in the last year.

Strangely enough, my comments never made it through moderation. I checked through the (tiny) backlogs of comments to see if what they did allow. Here’s the *first* response to information on L4D2: ‘Cow goes moo.’ Here’s a comment posted to the Final Fantasy announcement: ‘say what?’

Huh, I can see how my post might not meet the quality standards they have on TVGB.

I assume my not making it through moderation has something to do with my handle. BioWare and Blizzard have both previously decided that gay and lesbian are equivalent to the word shit, so expecting a small, independent blog to realize not allowing someone to comment because their handle has the word ‘lesbian’ is kinda homophobic may be a bit optimistic of me. It’s possible that the word ‘stripper’ is what they don’t allow… but that’s discrimination of a different sort.

People rarely treat the word stripper the way they do doctor or lawyer. It’s a dirty word because it’s about women who voluntarily sexualize themselves. Notice there’s no such problem with words like stud or gigolo.

The strange thing is that I didn’t expect this. I tend to move in very open-minded circles both in the real world and online and the majority of people I interact with don’t have issues with words like lesbian or stripper. Moreover, they play PnP RPGs, so they get the joke in ‘Lesbian Stripper Ninja.’

I'm going to try a few more comments. It's possible they just decided I was a trouble maker; if I continue to attempt to contribute, they might decide I'm doing so in good faith.

Splinter Cell: Conviction. Developer video

The Video Game Blog has a new video up about Splinter Cell: Conviction (due October 2009) and where Ubisoft plans to take the game.

Splinter Cell is one of my favorite series. Its modern world, spy premise is unique, and I enjoy the complex plots, slick production values, and fun stealth gameplay. I played the first three on my X-Box, and when Double Agent came out, got it on PC. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the level of finesse and control I was used to so I quickly set it aside. By the time Conviction gets here, I hope to have an X-Box 360 and to have finished Double Agent.

At this point, there is little they could do or say that would make me *not* buy this game. Still, some of what they’re saying makes the game sound less appealing.

One of the issues developers have to grapple with in a series is what to keep the same and what to change. There’s no right answer as ‘the fans’ will always complain. Ubisoft appears to be deemphasizing the stealth gameplay in favor of action, as well as simplifying the gun battles. One of the developers asks ‘Why would being seen mean game over? Why not let the action evolve to the next level?’ It’s a good question, but there are reasons for this particular mechanic.

The developer is engaging in a bit of hyperbole here; only a handful of times in the Splinter Cell series does being seen once means game over. Usually, it’s being spotted and identified three times or killing someone. This emphasis on stealth helps set Splinter Cell apart from other games on the market.

Game AI being what it is ‘evolve action to the next level’ can easily turn into ‘slaughter everything in sight while taking minimal damage.’ And while I like Ubisoft, I’ve never found the combat in their games particular complex or difficult. Having a pass/fail condition also makes sense in the game-world: you’re a single, lightly armed man in a building full of people with machine guns. In the real world, being spotted would mean death, capture, and/or a failure in the mission. I have no problem with ditching verisimilitude for fun where appropriate - Wolverine can tear through base of super marines and I won’t blink - but Tom Clancy novels and games attempt to be realistic.



I once read a review of horror films that talked about dread versus terror, and how different films evoked those emotions in the audience. Most run and gun games go for terror; they want your adrenaline to surge and your heart to beat at a mile a minute. At its best, Splinter Cell evokes dread. That sensation that someone’s slowly squeezing your heart as a group of heavily armed guard march through a dark hallway while Sam Fisher crouches inches away. The gnawing knowledge that if you’ve positioned yourself wrong and one of them spots you, it’s FAILURE. No taking them all out and then applying a bandage to make everything better.

One feeling isn’t better than the other: it’s all about what form of emotional masochism you’re in the mood for. I play the Splinter Cell series, and other stealth games, for the dread and I hope in an effort to update the franchise they manage to keep that feeling.

Women gamers had an article about updates to Dungeons and Dragons Online with a neat picture attached:


Sweet! I thought, Can I play that?

I eagerly clicked on the article and read about the blah, blah, blah with her elf blah, blah, patches.

Why don't games ever let me play something cool? I'm always the good-looking humanoid adventurer, never the interesting monster. Seriously, if I had the choice between a four-armed snake-lady and an elf, I'd never pick the elf, even if it meant running/slithering around in a chainmail bikini.